I predicted that Ned & Co. would be moving on, abandoning the Steemit platform, rather than nurturing and enhancing it. Can you imagine if brick and mortar business owners just walked away from their failing establishments to start new ones down the street? If Steemit is not a success, why would another platform be a success under the same management, with the same principles and the same centralized decision-making?

Investors should be asking if this new company and UI is being built with the Steemit Community's funds? Who's paying for this new venture and why is no one concerned that the time and money that has gone into building Steemit is a total write-off in the same way that the DLive investment is a total write-off?

So, should we assume that devs designing for Ned & Co.'s new UI aren't paid from the investments of STEEM blockchain investors? Isn't building from the ground up wasting investors' money? If the average cashout by a down-vote bot operator is $10,000/mo, what is the real cost of all devs and T20 witnesses in the Ned & Co. inner circle cashing out?

The general trend of STEEM value is down and it would be worthless by now, if not for the apparently synchronized investments that rescue this cryptocurrency from the grave. When the STEEM blockchain crashed on Sep 17, it came back online with an 18% pump. In a single hour, a day before the Hardfork, it spiked 31%. Who buys STEEM when the blockchain is proving itself vulnerable? New investors? I think not. How about existing investors recycling their cashouts? What else can explain the apparent hivemind pumps? There has been a 70% growth in STEEM since Sep 12! This can't be organic conversion growth. I suspect it's Ned & Co returning cash to the kitty that they previously cashed out.

STEEM Price Surges 31% Ahead of Steemit Velocity Hardfork
"On Monday afternoon the coin price surged 31%, climbing from a price of $0.852111. The majority of those gains came in less than an hour, between 16:00 and 16:30 UTC. The highest single concentration of trades comes in the form of STEEM/USDT on Huobi, while the rest of the market is shared predominantly between STEEM/BTC and STEEM/KRW."https://hacked.com/steem-price-surges-31-ahead-of-steemit-velocity-hardfork/